D&D 5E L&L Basic Dungeons & Dragons

[jbear]

Sooooo ... anyone involved in the thread 'The Cost of D&D 5e... It aint so bad' who was complaining about price like to weigh in and make a comment? Maybe eat them there words?

5e core rules are free. That's a pretty darn reasonable asking price if you ask me.

And the Starter Set in context is not a 'crippled product'. It is an introductory adventure with a dice set and pregens. It is not a crippled rule set as the rule set is freely available for the cost of going to wizard's website so they can advertise the advanced options of the game to you. Again, sounds like a fair deal to me.

I'm not interested in 5e at this stage, but I commend WotC of being so clever with their approach and marketing. I have definitely gone from largely disinterested to mildy curious.

 

[Aloïsius]

I have to say I didn't expect that much free material online.

Character creation up to lev 20. The 4 basic classes. The 4 basic races. Some monsters. Some DM stuff.

What intrigues me most is that the must be EXTREMELY confident in the value of their adventures, since they are the only products you "must" buy to play, being PHB, DMG and MM optional at this point,

And they must be very confident about their optional rules, races and classes. I would not be surprised if the most "min-max friendly" classes and sub-classes are NOT in Basic D&D.

As for the adventures being that great... Well, I'm somewhat skeptical. Most commercial adventures I read and played (with few exceptions), whatever the editor, where a succession of linear static dungeons. More often that Dungeons & Dragons, it has been Rail & Road.
If WotC is able to publish non linear (or seemingly non linear) adventures where dungeons are not an endless succession of 10 ft wide corridors, traps, doors and monster waiting to be slaughtered while the PC recover from their 15 minutes adventure's day, I would be happy to buy them. Very happy. If it's combined with a lighter ruleset, a convincing "bounded accuracy" and a flater power progression, it may be the best thing ever to happen to D&D. But that's a lot of "if".

 

[delericho]

Edit: Oh dear. It's funny how sometimes in the morning something that seemed so clear the day before can be revealed equally clearly to be nonsense. This post is one such example. I'll leave it here so that the replies continue to make sense, but... I do apologise.

Thinking on this, it would seem to explain the $50 price point for the "big three". Those books have just been downgraded - even the PHB isn't a "Core Rulebook"; it's a supplement.

WotC must know that this is going to hit sales of those books hard. So they'll most likely have ordered a much smaller print run to compensate, and that in turn means a higher unit cost. Hence the higher price for the books.

But more than that, this move would appear to make the D&D RPG as a whole a loss-leader for the overall brand. Because over the past two years they've invested significant amounts in developing a new edition, and they've just chopped the legs off sales of their biggest selling item (indeed, possibly their only big selling item). I fail to see how they could imagine adventure sales could possibly make that up.

 

[Mercurius]

What's not to like about this? I'm still waiting to hear from the perennial naysayers who will come up with some explanation for how this is just an evil corporate ploy.

WotC must know that this is going to hit sales of those books hard.

I question this, at least in the long run. In a way this PDF is the loss-leader than some were asking for; it may detract from initial sales, but the long-term effect is likely going to be very positive. It means that just about every gamer is going to own a copy of the 5E core rules. Consider it the "gateway drug." Maybe WotC has confidence in the quality of their future offerings, so by giving people a cheap (free) access point, more people in the long-term will end up buying books.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I have to say I didn't expect that much free material online.

Character creation up to lev 20. The 4 basic classes. The 4 basic races. Some monsters. Some DM stuff.

What intrigues me most is that the must be EXTREMELY confident in the value of their adventures, since they are the only products you "must" buy to play, being PHB, DMG and MM optional at this point,

They are confident people want to play more than the basic races/classes and buy the "advanced" rules. Which I am pretty sure will be everyone that likes the basic game. I really hope they focus on the adventures and try to make money that way.

 

[Valetudo]

I dont think this will affect the sales of the books all that much. If your the type of player that wants alot of options, your going to get the PHB. I still see DMs getting all three books, Ill probably wait for a bundle of the three on amazon, as I still am going to wait to see how good the edtiing is on the books. But this is something to hold me over till then and there is a group of people that just want a simple version of DND that might get drawn back in to purchasing some of the adventures and whatnot.

 

[Li Shenron]

Thinking on this, it would seem to explain the $50 price point for the "big three". Those books have just been downgraded - even the PHB isn't a "Core Rulebook"; it's a supplement.

WotC must know that this is going to hit sales of those books hard. So they'll most likely have ordered a much smaller print run to compensate, and that in turn means a higher unit cost. Hence the higher price for the books.

But more than that, this move would appear to make the D&D RPG as a whole a loss-leader for the overall brand. Because over the past two years they've invested significant amounts in developing a new edition, and they've just chopped the legs off sales of their biggest selling item (indeed, possibly their only big selling item). I fail to see how they could imagine adventure sales could possibly make that up.

...like the freely available SRD made 3e a failure?

 

[Will Doyle]

This is great news.

Being able to pick up any adventure you see on the shelf, and run it without an additional purchase? Just brilliant.

 

[Plageman]

Keep in mind that a SRD/OGL covers more than just what will be in the Basic game PDF so there is no reason why they couldn't do one.

I'm not sure about a print version of the Basic PDF, at least not immediately. Maybe some years down the road they may release a new "Introductory Set" at a low price bundled with a hardcopy version but they want to sell the PHB first and foremost.

 

[delericho]

I question this, at least in the long run. In a way this PDF is the loss-leader than some were asking for; it may detract from initial sales, but the long-term effect is likely going to be very positive. It means that just about every gamer is going to own a copy of the 5E core rules. Consider it the "gateway drug." Maybe WotC has confidence in the quality of their future offerings, so by giving people a cheap (free) access point, more people in the long-term will end up buying books.

Note that I specifically said those books - the PHB/DMG/MM. Making Basic D&D available for free might cause sales of adventures to rise, as there's no longer a $60-150 (depending on edition) prior investment required to use them.

Bear in mind that an awful lot of D&D players only ever buy the PHB - the minimum required to own the rules of the game. If "the minimum required to own the rules of the game" is now a case of downloading a free copy of Basic, a chunk of those people who only buy the PHB will now, instead, just download Basic. That's got to hurt sales.

...like the freely available SRD made 3e a failure?

There's also a difference between a fairly obscure set of HTML files tucked away in a corner of the 'net (that we knew about because we're interested, but the mainstream didn't), and a PDF presented on the main D&D website.

Perhaps more importantly, though, I didn't say this would make 5e a failure, I said it would impact sales. And if this is part of a larger strategy, losing sales of their in-print books may not be a failure anyway.